Kennth M. Setton provides a brief survey of the Thirty Years' Was as part of the background to Venetian relations with the Ottoman Empire. Having lost the island of Crete to the Turks in the long war of 16451669, Venice renewed her warfare with the Porte in 1684, this time as the ally of Austria after the Turkish failure to take Vienna the preceding year. The Venetians now conquered the Peloponnesus the Morea, and occupied Athens, with the disastrous result that the Parthenon was destroyed, a tragedy which receives much attention in this book. This volume is to some exrtent a continuation of the author's highly praised work on The Papacy and the Levant also published by the American Philosophical Society, which covers in four volumes the period from the Fourth Crusade 1204 to the battle of Lepanto 1571, and goes somewhat beyond.
